The present invention is in the environment of an apparatus having a display for displaying a zoomed image and a corresponding scrollbar.
Scrollbars, their functionality and applications are widely known in the art. A scrollbar is a graphical control element with which images such as continuous text, pictures, continuous measuring results or anything else can be scrolled, i.e., viewed even if it does not fit into the available space of a display or a window or viewport thereof.
Scrollbars are present in a wide range of electronic devices including computers, graphing calculators, mobile phones, and portable media players. They usually appear on one or two sides of the window of the windows in the form of long rectangular areas containing a bar or thumb that can be dragged along a trough or track to move the body of the document as well as two arrows on either end for precise adjustments. As the “thumb” of the scrollbar has different names in different environments and applications, it may also referred to as scroller, knob, scroll box, scroll thumb, elevator, quint, puck, wiper, grip. Additional functions of scrollbars may be found, such as zooming in/out or various application-specific tools. Depending on the graphical user interface, the size of the thumb can be fixed or variable in size. In the latter case of so-called proportional thumbs, their length would indicate the size of the window in relation to the size of the whole document or image. A proportional thumb that completely fills the trough indicates that the entire document is being viewed. In this scenario the scrollbar may also temporarily become hidden. The proportional thumb can also sometimes be adjusted by dragging at least one of its ends. In this case it would adjust both the position and the zooming of the document, where the size of the thumb represents the degree of zooming applied.
Besides these information provided by the scrollbar there is the need to obtain additional information. There are different approaches in the art for assigning additional information:
For example, the word-processing program “Microsoft Word 2010” of Microsoft Inc. provides for text documents typically at the right edge of a window a vertical scrollbar. If a user clicks the thumb of the scrollbar with a cursor, then a text box appears next to the thumb. This text box illustrates information of the current page number within the text document. After releasing the thumb of the scrollbar, the text box is disappearing again.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,739,817 describes an ECG measuring apparatus which comprises means for position information adjacent to a scroll box. When the cursor is on the thumb of the scrollbar and a mouse button is depressed, a data window opens adjacent the thumb and displays time information, such as hours, minutes and seconds of the time of the day when a measuring is conducted. Similar to the above described Microsoft Word approach, the data window moves with the scroll box and continues to display current time of the data displayed. When the mouse button is released, the data window closes again and the screen changes to display only the measuring data from the newly selected time.
In both above mentioned approaches the thumb of the scrollbar—when not activated—only provides relative information of the thumb within the text document without giving the user detailed information, such as detailed position information. For these detailed information, the user has to activate (i.e. click on) the thumb each time again.
Therefore, there is in particular the need to have the additional information permanently available. Another need is that the provision of this additional information should not have an impact on the displayed images.